Ex-WikiLeak Worker Starting Alternative Whistleblower Site OpenLeaks

Daniel Domscheit-Berg (pictured with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks), who once worked for WikiLeaks, is starting his own whistleblowing site that will operate a bit differently.

The German Domscheit-Berg, along with several other former Wikileaks staffers, plans to launch a website they’re calling OpenLeaks as early as next week, Domscheit-Berg told Forbes in an interview. Like WikiLeaks, the new site will allow leakers to anonymously submit information to a secure online dropbox. But unlike its parent site, it won’t publish that information itself. Instead, it will allow the source to designate any media or non-governmental organizations he or she chooses and have that information passed on for fact-checking, redaction and publication. That difference, argues Domscheit-Berg, will allow OpenLeaks to accomplish much of the transparency achieved by WikiLeaks, without drawing the same political fury and legal pressure.

“To constrain the power of the site, we’re splitting submission from the publication part. We won’t publish any documents ourselves. The whole field is diversified,” says Domscheit-Berg. “No single organization carries all of the responsibility or all of the workload.”

Domscheit-Berg describes his site as “a neutral conduit” that is to be “politically sustainable.” He doesn’t see his site as a competitor to WikiLeaks, as he doesn’t want the controversy.

But Domscheit-Berg wants to distance OpenLeaks from WikiLeaks, and says he has no intention of sharing the controversy that WikiLeaks has fueled since it published the first of a quarter million secret diplomatic cables last week. “I never knew about any diplomatic cables,” he adds. “You can’t imagine how happy I am to be out of this thing.”

He is also readying a book for publication called Inside WikiLeaks that will tell the story of why he left.